My Five #238

Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.

This week’s My Five is by Lisa.

1. Tenor GIF brands a run for their money

GIFs are everywhere. In fact, they’re becoming so popular, that more and more of the GIFs we see and share are actually ads in disguise.

Most of us find GIFs through specialised search engines. The main player here is Tenor which powers GIF searches in apps like Google’s Gboard, Duck Duck Go, iMessage, Slack, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp. With an engine that is used more than 200 million times a day, it’s no wonder that Tenor is seeking to monetise these searches.

David McIntosh, Tenor’s founder and CEO, recently told DigitalTrends in an interview that his platform has become “a search engine for people’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions – versus Google, where searches are very intent driven”. The goal of GIF ads is to map these emotions with advertisers.

If an advertiser wants its branded GIF to sit at the top of Tenor’s search results, it can pay to map its content to certain keywords. The ads will run on a cost per share basis, so brands will only have to pay Tenor when a user actually shares the GIF.

Lil Wayne makin’ it rain. Via Tenor.

2. Keep calm, and carry on

This photo of a man cutting the grass with a tornado swirling behind him has been causing quite the storm on social media.

3. #LavaChallenge

Nowadays we’ve got to film ourselves doing literally anything and tag it on social media as a ‘challenge’ otherwise it didn’t happen. But a good game will always be a good game, and the latest hot trend may be all too familiar to those of us that remember the pre-internet, pre-mobile days, when all we needed was an imagination to get by.